Charon's Program
by Seiberwing
Summary: Helpless, hurting and alone, a dying Sixshot gets a rather unusual vistor.


**Disclaimer:** The TFs ain't mine.

**Charon's Program**

_In the entire history of screw-ups,_ thought what remained of Sixshot as his halfway shattered optic watched Galvatron grow to even greater heights, _I think I set a new record for being the worst one. _

Those parts of him that didn't hurt probably weren't attached anymore. Sixshot could feel his fuel pump pulsating, pumping fuel intended for his body onto the cracked and beaten ground underneath him. He was dying, and he knew that he was dying, and somehow that wasn't the thing that was making him depressed.

_I tried to kill Prime for you, brother. And I failed. _

Now he and his brother would only be remembered as a pair of Decepticons who had been foolish enough to follow a lunatic. If they were lucky, people might talk a few times about their terrifying crime sprees, how they'd left mountains of dead and injured in their paths before being captured. But Sixshot doubted it.

"Any chance that you're gonna stop angsting sometime today?"

Sixshot could barely move his neck, but he managed to turn enough to see who was speaking in that achingly familiar voice. Shockblast was looking down at him as clear as reality, antennae positioned in such a way that meant he was smirking. Sixshot gasped in hopeful disbelief before his pained and addled mind found a logical explanation.

_It's not him, can't be. That programmed copy of him I made must have activated on its own. _

He tried to mentally switch the program off, but Shockblast remained standing over him, his silhouette blocking out the strange lights in the sky from whatever it was that Galvatron was doing. Sixshot could barely see anymore, and besides that he didn't really care. It was over for him, all that was left was for his body to realize he was dead and let his spark finally limp off to Primus and the Allspark.

"G..go," his cracked vocalizer managed to force out.

"Don't talk, Sixshot, I can hear you. And I'm not going away."

_Why now? Haven't I been tortured enough without him coming to laugh at me? _

"Torture? Don't tell me I'm that annoying." The image of Shockblast threw his head back and laughed in perfect Shockblast fashion, astonishing Sixshot with how realistic the malfunctioning program was in even the smallest details.

Sixshot had created the program in his cell at Torrent Maximum Security Prison, using the datapad and stylus that a soft-sparked guard had given him when no one else was watching. He'd spent almost all of his time working on it, having very little else to do anyway, and only found out later that the program was the only thing that remained of his older brother. After that he'd never had the courage to delete it.

Sixshot made another major effort and turned his head away again. _I failed, Shockblast. I couldn't avenge you. _Not as if that would make any sense to the program. He'd been very careful to make it "think" it was alive.

The Shockblast image walked around to the other side of Sixshot and crouched beside him. "You would've failed anyway even if you did kill Prime. You were gunning for the wrong guy. It wasn't Prime who did me in; give me a little more credit than that. I wouldn't go down to some Autobot peace-in-the-universe pansy."

_And now he's-no, fraggit, _it_ is malfunctioning._ Sixshot tried to look away a third time but his neck was refusing to work. All the other noises around him became obscured as his audial sensors began to shut down, leaving Shockblast's voice to rule uncontested.

"Sixshot, I'm dead," Shockblast said, his antennae flicking up to indicate minor annoyance. "You can't malfunction when you're dead. Now, shut up and listen to me. It wasn't Prime. It was Megatron. I was stupid enough to try and hook up to Unicron, my body went nuts, and Mega-well, I guess he's Galvatron now. Anyway, he had Unicron crush me."

This made Sixshot mentally sit up and start paying attention. The Shockblast program was designed to react to speech and events the way the real Shockblast would, but it couldn't gain knowledge outside of its own programming or information given directly to it. Even in a malfunction, there was no way it could know of the demise of the mech upon which it was based. Besides that, it didn't have the creativity to make up a story like the one it had just spun. It didn't have any knowledge of Unicron either, outside of what happened during the Unicron Battles an eighth of a vorn ago, and everyone knew about that. None of this was possible.

The program gently smacked him on the side of the head, and for some reason Sixshot's sensors registered it as a real impact. "I'm not a fragging program. Get it through your head, you geeky dim-bulb." He propped himself up on its gun arm and rested his head on his fist. "I can't believe you even made that thing in the first place; do you know how creepy that is? I get put off in solitary confinement and you make a freaky program to replace me."

_I missed you._ Sixshot gave up trying to turn the program off. He knew it was fake, but seeing it somehow felt…well, it was better than wallowing in his own depression. At least he could fool himself into thinking he was getting one final chance to speak with his brother.

"And you messed yourself up even more talking to it and pretending it was me. That's even creepier. I thought you were made of sterner stuff." Shockblast stood up and offered Sixshot his hand, flicking his antennae back and forth impatiently. "Now stop lying there moping and let's get moving. I want to be out of here in time to go watch Prime and Galvatron have their big fight." His optic brightened again, and a single antenna flipped forward to indicate excitement. "And I mean, this is gonna be a _big_ fight. Prime'll win, of course, but it'll be fun while it lasts."

Sixshot found himself growing lighter. All the residual pain was going away and being replaced by a feeling of warmth and peace. He took Shockblast's hand—somehow he was standing up now—and stepped away from the yellowish pile of scrap piled under his feet, no longer feeling any sort of attachment to it.

"C'mon, bro," said Shockblast with a figurative grin. "There's a guy downstairs that wants to talk to you."

* * *

Author's Note: The "guy downstairs" is a reference to Primus, who is inside Cybertron, not a reference to any individual of any Earth religion. I have no intention of sending Sixshot to Hell. He's too cute for that. 


End file.
